4/09/2020

Airbrake Joins Elsewhere Portfolio

Cloud-based applications require a new approach to quality assurance

The burden of managing application errors has expanded from a sole responsibility of Quality Assurance (QA) to a shared team effort across QA, engineering and DevOps. As cloud-based technologies become industry standard, software developers must build applications more dynamically to handle a vast array of potential user environments resulting from many permutations of hosting services, software languages, web browsers, data repositories, etc.

Furthermore, adoption of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes by nature create new application errors daily that are more often discovered by users in post-production. Broad development teams must work together to monitor and fix errors to manage application performance and improve user experience.

In addition to increasing complexity, the sheer scale of application performance issues is massive. In 2019, over 200 billion apps were downloaded according to App Annie’s 2020 State of Mobile Report. Development teams often receive over a million application error messages per month from numerous, disparate logging and reporting systems.

We spent months with our Operating Advisors (OAs) pouring over Slack channels, whiteboards, and cups of coffee researching how companies keep up with and make efficient use out of this data. In the midst of this research, we found a differentiated solution that can effectively identify, triage, and remediate application errors.

Elsewhere announces $11 million Series A investment in Airbrake

Airbrake is a fully remote software company that provides real-time error monitoring for the end-to-end application stack for thousands of engineering teams. Not only does Airbrake monitor and prioritize errors, but also it provides teams with "breadcrumbs" to tie errors back to specific code changes. Since it spun out of Rackspace in 2015, Joe Godfrey and Joe Roberts have led the Company to strong, profitable growth without any sales and marketing resources, a great example of product-led growth.

Our OAs brought critical industry expertise to the search process and due diligence of Airbrake. We recruited several of them to join the Airbrake team:

• Shelley Perry, Executive Chairman (Insight Partners, HP, Newegg, NTT)
• Treb Ryan, CEO (Dimension Data, OpSource)
• Eric Anderson, CTO (CopperEgg, Oracle, StackEngine)
• Chad Savoy, CRO (Datadog, SolarWinds)

After completing the investment in January, we launched our “First 100-Day Plan” led by our OAs. Joe and Joe will continue to lead product and engineering and are excited to add considerable Go-To-Market and technology expertise to help accelerate growth. This seasoned management team will build on Airbrake’s impressive product foundation to scale the go-to-market function, refine the product roadmap, and continue to drive value for application developers and end users alike.

Please read more about our investment here (press release).